NTL makes bid for Virgin Mobile UK buyout

Through various combinations of offers
involving weird fractions of shares and certain amounts of "pence," NTL has reached an agreement of with the
Independent Board of Virgin Mobile Holdings to buy out the entire Virgin Mobile MVNO. The straight up cash offer is GBP
962.4 million ($1.68 billion USD), 372 pence per share. NTL is also offering 0.23245 shares of their stock for Virgin
Mobile shares, or 0.18596 NTL shares plus 67 pence each. Virgin Mobile, which operates on the T-Mobile network, is the
UK's largest MVNO, at 4.3 million subscribers. NTL is also entering into an agreement that allows them to brand their
TV and fixed-line phone services as Virgin. We can't say we've exactly crunched all the numbers, so it's hard to give a
thumbs up or down on the fiscal validity of the offer, but we're cooking up a sweet graph in Excel right now -- drop
shadows and everything.